Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism

Diaspora as a Love Story

What if black women's diaspora were a love story? Not a romance (although it could be), but a modern account of profound desire and longing, deep anguish, and actions of the heart that blend together the emotional, mystical, and physical into what we call love. Love fits as a concept because it incorporates experiential and psychic fields that defy language in spite of our attempts to quantify its feeling. Scholars of color have turned to love, and its presence because it is one of the few concepts that can carry the weight and variance of emotion, thought, and practice needed for social change.¹ Its presence beckons an expansion of our understanding of diaspora by relieving black loss and suffering from shouldering the weight of the prospects of black collectivities into a different present. My use of love embraces its generative possibilities as a framework for the communion pursued in black life out of the ruptures torn by the life-depleting forces of heteropatriarchal racism and capitalism. Love holds the promise for what has been lost and what still needs to be.

My attention to love in relation to diaspora also emanates from a care with what underlies the political organizing and networks of black women. Without a doubt, how black women devise and enact their politics remains a critical space in which to theorize ongoing gendered, racial, and economic domination and the efforts to transform and liberate its subjects [End Page 437] (Caldwell 2007; Perry 2013; Santos 2013; Sudbury 1997; Werneck 2007). Yet such a focus can shade how women's internal longings compel them into discovery and connection, and into their voices. This essay regards these encounters and relations as informing another epistemology of diaspora and social change and explores what M. Jacqui Alexander calls the "fragile, delicate undertaking of revealing the beloved to herself and to one another" (2005, 18) and what Keisha-Khan Perry (2009) emphasizes as solidarity. The work hones in on what black women's diasporic scholarship has already begun to impart, even if not its theoretical cornerstone (Boyce-Davies; Caldwell 2007; Perry 2009; Tinsley 2008; Wekker 2006).

To contemplate this field of love, I turn to Kevin Quashie's (2012) notion of "quiet" or black interiority and the spectrum of experiences and desires that compel black women to search, speak, and connect. Black interiority invites a deeper engagement of the inner worlds of black women as a site where dispossession and longing live and compel action. Consider Saidiya Hartman's work on slavery and diaspora (2007, 2008). Driven by intellectual and personal inquiries, Hartman pushes up against the limits of the historical archive to theorize the untellable narratives of the enslaved and their descendants: the separation, dispersal, and trauma.² Loss, desire, and Hartman's scholarly pursuits act as affective accounts of the ways black women survive, search, and connect. Hartman assesses, "those in diaspora translated the story of race into one of love and betrayal" (2007, 6). For Hartman, the violence of racial hierarchy, ruptured kin ties, and their emotional tidal waves are what racial solidarity sought to repair. The pursuit and practice of diaspora—the one that Hartman undertakes and then writes—exhibits these yearnings and encounters. She knows she may not find or be able to recuperate histories of the enslaved, but she nonetheless seeks to make them felt. Although Hartman does not name it as such, what else could fuel Hartman's seemingly contradictory, tireless, and endless pursuits than love?

This conceptualization of diaspora finds less solid footing next to those narratives driven by freedom, home, or exile, and structured by what Michelle Wright (2015) posits as a linear progressive framework. Conceptualizing diaspora within a story of love does not privilege joy over pain, or loss over longing. The persistence of anti-black racism combined with the social, economic and political depletion of black people make [End Page 438] concrete political and social objectives necessary. They also can amount to unaddressed existential and affective quandaries and limited social spaces in which to seriously engage heartaches and even nihilistic feelings.³ Love is neither the remedy nor an answer to these entangled problems but provides another vantage. It suggests a channel for exploring the conversations and acts that reveal the nature of the struggle and how specifically black women stay in it together. As we work to make sense of our persons and positions, we labor to intellectually and emotionally engage the ramifications of what the history and on-going pressure of anti-black racism created, and to clarify how to live, and live pursuing what else could be.

I return to Hartman's scholarship and its autobiographical nature as evidence of this lesser told love story of diaspora. Her intellectual investigations are underwritten by emotional and perspective shifts that move her to change her name, study race, and eventually venture to Ghana to place herself in diaspora (Hartman 2007, 2008). The breadth of Hartman's story and her re(writing) of it reflects the inner journey, filled with emotion, and how black women writers travel in their fictional autobiographies. The narrator Xuela, of Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, candidly acknowledges, "To this day, I have tried to tell the difference between [love and hate], and I cannot, because often they wear so much the same face" (1996, 22). For this black Caribbean woman, whose mixed ancestry and life of physical and emotional abandonment read like the history of slavery and colonization of the island of Dominica where she grew up, there is no differentiation between these two emotions. Xuela discloses her story—more of its pains than pleasures—to recount the life of her mother who died birthing her. While she specifies that she never knew love, she nonetheless pens love letters to her unknown mother and transmits the intimate details of her story. Her contemplations about her experiences of subjection and isolation come out in writing her life, her mother's life, and what the indistinguishability of the two makes evident: black women write themselves into communion with other black women and in whose lives they experience parts of themselves. Although unspoken, Kincaid and Hartman's narratives tell a love story of black women's diaspora as the fire and forging of the inter and intrapersonal terrain of black women's lives and relationships. [End Page 439]

When we black women write ourselves, our autobiographies labor to dialogue with a story larger than our own. For such writers as Hartman, Kincaid, and Werewere Liking, this loving venture becomes the diaspora they practice. Yearning to tell her Aunt Roz's story, Halla, the narrator of Liking's The Amputated Memory, is re-directed by her aunt to go deep into her own memory and tell her own story. Halla quickly recognizes: "If I were to truly get hold of my share of both individual and collective memory again, it was through myself that I would discover her" (Liking 2007, 7). Understanding her own reflection in the larger group of women of her clan, Halla eulogizes these women for how, in the face of all the violence they experienced under colonial, racial, and patriarchal rule, they "remain[ed] cherished, indispensable, and self-possessed" (Liking 2007, 8). Such presence, assuredness, and love impart how black women live in spite of various forms of domination and how writing ourselves transforms our experience into words that connect us with others in struggle.

This essay joins the writing of several black women to reveal our processes of creating diaspora in a framework of love. I begin with excerpts of letters from my grandmother who wrote to me from Guyana during my childhood in the U.S. These written exchanges constitute the relationship we were able to have, given our geographic and economic constraints, even as they reveal the ways in which our lives and our writing created dialogues that transcend space and time. Next, I narrate my phone and email exchanges with Iara, a black feminist Brazilian activist who has spent most of her career in social movements in Brazil. Since our meeting during my anthropological fieldwork, she has been a collaborator in my research as well as a teacher, mentor, and friend. Our fragmented communications address the longings, losses, and solidarity encompassed in the practices of black women's diaspora. And last, I turn to Iris, a black woman now in her seventies who was an interlocutor for my research with a singing group of aging black women in Brazil. Her poetry and other voicings speak to what is at stake for black women in writing themselves even when they have no specific audience with whom to create diaspora. Together these women and their writings suggest the space of mutual or hoped for understanding, identification, and support. They ethnographically add nuance to the larger embodied practice of black women's diaspora by providing a qualitative feel for our expression and what guides our journeys, spirits, and politics. [End Page 440]

Of Letters

One of my grandmothers penned these letters to me from her home on stilts in Georgetown, Guyana where the streets flood with the rise of the tides and rain. I watched her sturdy body move about her wooden house, the geckos on the high walls, and inhaled the subtle scent of death that emanated from my grandfather's weakening body. These are the first memories I have of her and the first traces of diaspora that come to mind. Returning to my grandmother's letters long after her passing and in the midst of researching black women across the geographies of people of African descent added dimension to how black women write themselves into meaning and this practice of diaspora.

January 29^th, 1989.

My dear Celeste,

It is a great pleasure to receive your letter. The postman had to ask me about the person who addressed me as Granny Shirley Henery. I told him about you and showed him a photograph on your last visit here.

Celeste, it is not that I do not want to visit you, but I cannot apply until the business with Grandfather's will is settled. I will be able to make a will of my own, and travel as long as I like. At present, we have a shortage of electricity and water. One week we had no electricity for 4 days. Lots of food had to be thrown away; even Ice Cream. I could have cried. Tell your mother it was soursop Ice Cream.

Tell your parents that Mrs. Miller sent her love. That Mr. Bobb across the road died after being sick for three weeks; he was buried on the third of January. Would they please send a card of sympathy to Mrs. Jessie Bobb? Bruno is fine. He would not even put on a little weight. Cheerio dear granddaughter. Accept lots of love from your granny.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx give one to each parent.

July 13^th, 1990.

My dear Celeste,

Thank you for your beautiful letter. I just wondered what had become of you all. Your letter was written in April, but I got it on the sixth of July. Anyways, I am very very glad to hear from you. Thank you for writing. [End Page 441] Your aunt Carole, Uncle Deryck, and Cecily are all well and send their love. I went down to tell Rover that you had asked about him but he was not there; he had burst the chain and gone through the fence to the front house! The ducks there chased him, so he had to run back. Your cousin Joyce in Canada sent him that chain. She and her husband were sure that he could not burst that one; but he did. Yet he is so thin, he looks as if he is starved. Love, your Granny cannot come to California. She does not have that amount of money ($39,000). Then my sight is poor. I can only see from one eye. I was hoping to see the American Specialist last April, but no ophthalmologist came. I am hoping they will come in August, then they will see to my eye. I am praying for that to happen. . . .

Please tell your parents that when I heard of the earthquake I wrote them three letters. Two were returned. I wrote asking Uncle Leslie if he knew your whereabouts but he had not replied. So I just gave up and decided that if they wanted me to know they would write! Tell your mom Mrs. Miller sends her love, and that she was praying that one day she would find time to write me.

Cheerio granddaughter; accept lots of love and a dozen kisses from your dear granny.

PS. Please send me a picture, a recent one.

September 8^th, 1990

My dear Celeste,

Thank you for your beautiful letter. I am happy thank God and pleased to know that you are so far away, sending lots of love to me. May the Good God Bless you.

The old dog's name came to me; forgive an old woman's mistake. I wish you had a Happy Birthday. I cannot remember the date. You must tell me what is the correct date. I see you have sent love for Carole, George and Heather, instead of Cecily. Anyway I gave Cecily your love; Bye dear. Accept lots of love from your dear grandmother.

My grandmother sent me these letters between 1986 and 1991, before her passing in 1999. It is the correspondence of a woman in her 80s and girl in her pre-teens; and the accounts tell of a family spanning geographies, societies, and desires. My grandmother writes modestly but candidly about [End Page 442] the content of her day-to-day, her barking watchdog I would talk to but was afraid to pet, and family members I had failed to remember. She also wrote complicated messages for me to innocently pass to my parents. I am not sure if others wrote her, even though three of her five children and their families permanently lived outside of Guyana. As responses to my own missives, the letters she sent arrived as small stand-ins for a physical presence she never was able to have in my daily life. Raised in the U.S., I had only been to visit her twice. She kept herself animated in my youth through these letters and the occasional three-minute phone conversation. Years passed and in the context of my scholarship on black women, I now study these letters, their simplicity and affection, with the eyes of an adult scholar reading two black women in dialogue. The letters do not tell much of my grandmother's life (or my own); however, they detail her desire to keep in relationship with a grandchild and express her love in a time when expensive phone calls and plane tickets were never an option. As will be illustrated throughout the examples in this essay, black women's socioeconomic conditions shape the nature of their connections and movement, and my grandmother's writings make this transparent.

Guyana continues to be a small, economically struggling country that bears the marks of its colonial legacy. The 1980s was a period of political instability that complicated daily life in soaring prices and inflated currency (Gafar 1998; Nettles 2008; Thomas 1996). Even with remittances, my grandmother struggled to purchase particular food supplies, such as cooking oil and wheat flour, and resources to mend a deteriorating roof. She documents these conditions in such details as failed utilities and hopes for specialized medical care. I saw her last in 1993, the year she came to the U.S. to have cataract surgery. She responds directly to my continued naïve pleas to have her visit with a grounded and sobering response about an inconceivable amount of money. I distinctly remember being embarrassed, feeling my presumptions and missteps, in my love-inspired calls for her presence.

I now read her candor as an effort to document her reality to make clear that it was not a lack of love keeping her physically distant. In an environment where resources were thin, these letters arrived on lined paper and old Hallmark cards. They were attempts to provide and ultimately leave me with a sense of her presence, which has survived her. My grandmother [End Page 443] used the only sustainable form of contact available to lovingly secure herself in my memory. For a U.S. born child whose needs beyond the basics were met, the written details of my grandmother's struggles felt sharp and complicated and part of an unfamiliar reality at the time. Nonetheless, my grandmother clarified and documented the truth of why she could not be more present. Any sadness or yearning on her part is written over by the sobering power of economic and social realities that prohibited physical contact, but could not constrict her feelings and expressions of love.

What I find captivating and illustrative of her acts of writing is how they sustained her presence in my life while opening up possibilities for diaspora. From the anticipation and initial reading of these letters to my revisiting of them, to my current interpretation, I stay connected to her and how our relationship fuels my own journey.

Alexis Gumbs's notion of queer intergenerationality reconceives the intergenerational exchange between grandmother and granddaughter into one that, "makes more possible than she [my grandmother could] say, yet" (2010, 384). Gumbs theorizes how alternative possibilities of social change are co-produced through the encounters she experiences and theorizes in the writings of black feminist poets such as Audre Lorde and June Jordan. Gumbs instructs,

there is something present between us that exceeds the time and space within which we (don't) encounter each other. There is something produced that cannot be narrated and that does not survive except that it does. There is something between us that persists because of and despite the fact that we want it

(2010, 6).

Through reading the works of these poets and conversing with them, Gumbs queers the notion of generation in order to posit forms of sociality rooted in "accountability, desire and transformation" (2010, 59) instead of racialized heteropatriarchal concepts of family, reproduction, and lineage. This insight and "reading" (2010, 63–69) enables the love expressed in my grandmother's letters to travel across space and time, out of ink and paper, and into curiosities and desires beyond the scope of her life. Through this conceptual lens, I encounter my grandmother in her letters as another black woman hungering to stay in touch with another black (yet-to-be) woman and to extend her hope and love beyond her material life. In returning to the letters over [End Page 444] time, I recognize a conversation between two black women with differences and longings present and acting a source of connection and vision.

My grandmother did not write wisdoms or her story, yet her letters invited me to learn more about who she was as a woman. Long before the physical distance that eventually separated her from half of her children, who moved abroad, and then later her grandchildren, my grandmother lost her own mother only six months after her birth and her father when she was eight years old. An aunt, then an uncle, raised her and by twelve years old she was working as a teacher's assistant. My grandmother spent much of her time on this planet breaking colonial, gendered, classed, and racial protocols, marrying at thirty in the 1930s, creating a home-economics school specifically for women, and with it, affirming a vision of possibility that betrayed societal expectations for economically poor people of color. These are just a spattering of the ways she deviated from dominant, specifically racial, patriarchal models. Her innovation paired with recognition of the intersectional forms of oppression holding back children specifically, resemble the vision and actions taken by many black feminists whose critiques of and mobilization against inequality are the hallmarks of their praxis. I read her history as a prism through which I now see her and her letters within diaspora. Her letters read like an inversion of Kincaid's aforementioned protagonist who lovingly writes her own autobiography to bring her mother's story out of silence. Perhaps it was my grandmother's writing of herself that drew me into voice and prose to explore the traces of her love and longings through others.

Of Phone Calls, Emails, and Missed Connections

I call her and the phone rings endlessly. No answering machine picks up. I call the next day and talk to her mother, father, or son. They are well and glad I called, but Iara is at a meeting or at the doctor. Tomorrow she has another doctor's appointment, so I call later in the evening. I just missed her. I send emails, but it's unlikely she has paid her Internet bill. Her precarious financial situation in her current state of unemployment and months of chemotherapy have offset many things in her forty-year-old body, her psyche, her family life, and the least of these, our contact. Missed [End Page 445] phone calls, sparse emails are the norm in our relationship, but have become ever more irregular, hit or miss, since her diagnosis.

Iara is now many things to me, but I first met her in Brazil in 2003 while researching black women's organizing around health. Another activist connected me with Iara who had founded a black feminist organization concentrating on black women's health concerns. Since then, Iara and her organization have facilitated my participation in political gatherings, introduced me to other activists, and provided opportunities to observe black women's political strategizing in Brazil. Iara participated in and guided my research because of our shared concerns about the conditions of black women, and because she believed in what might grow from the small diaspora we created.

Her spirits were lower than usual one day when I called in October 2011 and she began to tell me about her last visit with the oncologist. She no longer had health insurance and consequently sat in lines at hospitals as a user of Brazil's public health system—the Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) or Unified Health System. She described her back-to-back visits with a variety of specialists and detailed a conversation she had with a psychologist referred to her by the oncologist. She was struggling with feelings of worth, since she had been unable to work and provide for her family. She also was painfully aware that requests for her participation in the events of social justice organizations had trickled down to almost nothing. As a woman who had defined her life around her commitment to the betterment of black women's lives, staying at home was antithetical to her socio-political ethos and contracting to her spirit. What felt like a form of incarceration was only reinforced when sitting in the hospital's waiting room. She weepingly reflected to me, "I looked at all of these women. Most of them were black and they were waiting to be seen. They had cancer and came at dawn and probably stayed until dusk. They will probably never receive treatment and die. I know people at the hospital, and so I got in to see the doctor pretty quickly, but most of these women will never get that attention or treatment" (Iara, telephone call with author, October 7, 2011). She continued by saying that she told this to the psychologist expressing her anger and frustration about the state of health care.

Iara asked, "Do you know what the psychologist told me? She said that I was right: two people would probably die in order for me to get treatment [End Page 446] and so I need to only worry about myself" (ibid.). She recounted how she questioned the psychologist, "Is this what you call democracy? Is this the protection of rights and health care of our new great Brazilian democracy?" Iara was in tears—a rare sound across the phone—and she said, "The psychologist had no idea who I am, what I have committed my life to" (ibid.).

I was aware of the misrecognition and consequent feeling of invisibility that Iara experienced in the comments of the psychologist. Iara has dedicated her life to improving those of economically poor black women. The individualism and distance heard within the psychologist's advice was a separation that Iara had never seen between her own life and those of the women around her. Iara grew up in difficult financial circumstances with a mother who was a domestic worker and a father who was a truck driver. Iara and her siblings, like her parents, were without extensive formal education as they all worked as children to help economically support their families. The rapport she built with varied communities has been partially due to the fact that her life was similar to those of the women for whom she advocated. Iara's familiarity with black women's struggles enabled her to build solidarity. Her principal understanding of how gender, race, and class hierarchies have shaped these women's lives and her own helped her become a trusted and successful activist.

The devastation black women experience in the frequency of misrecognition leads them to search for and disclose their internal worlds to those in whom they find resemblance and understanding. Coming forward to share the isolating feelings produced by gendered racism and other forms of social oppression means risking having one's experiences deemed inconceivable, misplaced or worse—denied or betrayed. This risk is exemplified in the oversights of the psychologist. She was a white professional whose approach revealed a limited knowledge of how structural forces configure black women's lives and how black women relate to and understand their circumstances. Her misrecognition of Iara addresses the probability that the psychologist's education and training presumably did not include theories of the ways in which race, gender, class, and other experiential frameworks shape individual lives, emotions, and society at large in Brazil (Carone, et. al eds. 2002; Caldwell 2007, 115–118). In Brazil where the hegemonic experiential paradigm is woven together through the [End Page 447] threads of whiteness, men's bodies, and economic privilege, black women fail to be understood through the knit of their own embodiment (Caldwell 2007; Carneiro 2000; Gonzalez 1982). Consequently, the possibility for black women's misrecognition can come even at the word of other black women because of these racialized structures, making black women's search for communication and resonance a difficult process and searched for necessity. M. Jacqui Alexander, commenting on black women's solidarities and politics asserts: "We cannot afford to cease yearning for each others' company" (2005, 269).

Iara and I sat with these tender realities eight thousand miles apart. Her frustration with the psychologist's statement, what she witnessed in the waiting room, and her own fears about her cancer were intimate acts of expression. Bringing me into conversation with her experiences demonstrated her faith in the intimacy and recognition generated by witnessing. Through her interchanges as an activist, Iara believed these connections take black women out of the isolating effects of oppression and into voice, which in turn gives us power to change ourselves and potentially others. Iara also believed in the exploration that I am locating in diaspora. Her mistrust of academics softened enough for me to share parts of my life story and intellectual desires. And through our conversations, we forged a relationship that guides our individual journeys on different continents and on different social and economic footing. These moments on static-filled phone lines capture the practice of diaspora.

The writing of black women, I theorize, carries with it parts of the self that seek out and find expression in the lives of other black women. In discussing the significance of the most literal form of black women's writing—letters in this instance—Barbara and Beverly Smith relay, "The scope of this correspondence among Black women shows how important we are to each other's lives. In a system where Black women have primacy to no one else, we have primacy to each other" (1979, 64). This notion of black women having "primacy," emotional, intellectual, and spiritual, founds Iara's and my relationship. The way Iara wrote herself in this phone call exemplifies a practice of translating her experiences so she and I move into mutual expression and understanding bridging across our varied social and personal differences. We practice diaspora by making our primacy felt, which opens up the possibility for on-going transformative engagement. [End Page 448]

Black women can misrecognize other black women, even as they may find recognition. Iara experienced frustrations and aches with deceptions and disregard in working with other black women. Currently, she struggles with the distance of her black women friends and colleagues now that she has been in treatment for cancer. This distancing appears as a common story for persons living with cancer, but given some of the premises of black women's political organizing around health, Iara felt abandoned as she coped with her treatment and future alone. Audre Lorde eloquently assesses, "we [black women] have become to each other unmentionably dear and immeasurably dangerous" (1984, 157). Our interpersonal failures to see one another's full humanity betray our purported shared experiences and longings. In Brazil and beyond, the social and political worlds and platforms of black women's activism in which Iara has participated do not necessarily entail the types of intimacies and faith referenced here. These two spheres, while connected, perform different types of work. However, the love story of diaspora encompasses these disloyalties and losses holding room for the scope of varied interactions and dynamics. While painful for Iara, these disloyalties have yet to impede and may have even inspired her commitment to write herself into the lives of black women. Living with the unknowns and physical discomfort of cancer, she finds herself in another form of isolation and silence out of which our communion and writing are mutual explorations and practices of diaspora as love.

________

I now shift to excerpts from an email I received from Iara several days after our phone call. As mentioned, her infrequent access to email made such messages few and far between, but she later told me that out of necessity she went to a cyber café to write:

Axé, my dear sister of the heart. It is so important to me that you have not left me behind because this has not been easy for me. . .This cancer has come to make me think about everything. But thinking about everything is painful and I have always been here to help people and now I am unable to do so. When the doctor told me it was cancer, I melted into tears. [The night before the surgery] was the longest night [End Page 449] of my life because I was in the hospital and they were going to operate early the next day, but the doctors had 10 women to operate on and I was to be the last. Anxiety took hold of my thoughts and I kept thinking about what clothes I would wear in order to avoid the fear that I was feeling. I did not have the courage to talk about my fears. Remember how I told you about my work strategies and how I always wear certain clothes to confront the racism and sexism of the white women in the office who always thought they were better for having a degree even as they would hug and kiss me everytime I would arrive. So many times in my life, I have put aside my fear and confronted everyone and everything. But that night, it was difficult because I did not know how my life was going to be. I stopped to open a window into my life that I never liked to open because I was a black feminist activist and I could never be afraid and am always ready to help other women. . . I have felt so alone, but today I woke up and thought about what you told me and that I was not alone. That I needed to find people to be by my side. Today I had the courage.

Thank you for being my sister who is always helping me. I am sorry because I have yet to write anything for you. It is something that I want—to put onto paper all of our dialogues. There are ones that I want to remember, but when I pick up a pen nothing comes out. Right now it's a phase I am going to have to work through and I have arrived in spite of the fact that I want to kill myself for not having the courage to confront my fears and to acknowledge that first I have to confront my own world in order for me to confront the outside world and for me to start thinking about my anxiety. I had to admit that I was bringing those problems to bed with me, suffering from anticipation. I had to admit that I was worried about car insurance, about my house, but I never thought that I should have cherished and been protecting my own life, my emotions and I punished myself. I no longer am doing this. . .The fear of tomorrow, of failing, of being defeated, to have a social image diminished. I was unable to liberate myself. I worried too much about the opinion of others. It has never been so difficult to change my story; I have always taken care of others with kindness and have never had such kindness for myself

(Iara, e-mail message to author, October 23, 2011). [End Page 450]

Her email ends here as if the phone died or the line dropped. I never directly replied to her by email only because we later spoke about the email over the phone and she was pleased I had received it. She simply asked if it made sense; and our conversations have taught me that our exchanges don't have to.

Black women's writing liberates our path into diaspora. Iara used our first phone call to finally voice her anger with and fear of her life-threatening situation. Having and establishing a space to express the range of emotions moving through her was something Iara, like other black women, have sought and mobilized to create (Collins 2000, 100–105). In the context of this relational space of identification and trust, Iara had her feelings affirmed and her thinking challenged. She had used the myth of black women's endless strength (Collins 2001, 69–96; Gilliam and Gilliam 1999; Giacomini 1988; Perry 2011; Santos 2007) to cloak herself, and yet by speaking from her inner world, she liberated herself, if only momentarily, from the socialized stereotyped notions of what black women can and cannot be.

Between our first phone call and her email, Iara reached out to the psychologist, whose failed attempts to assist her gave way to a supportive exchange. Iara permitted herself to receive guidance from a professional who could understand her struggle with a potentially terminal illness. This help moved Iara out of a sense of isolation long enough to experience greater connection to self and others as well as possibilities for living in spite of her cancer.⁴ Iara's acts of writing herself and their diasporic imprint are practices of expression and communion, which enable different forms of being, (self) realization, and relationship. These practices of diaspora build more expansive ways of living for black women.

My communications with Iara remain irregular, and, like all relationships, have the potential to become one-sided or fall out of resonance. Our engagements are not always connecting or enough; therein lies the loss. The differences in our conditions and realities can cause undesired frustrations and misunderstandings. Iara struggles to actually write with either a pen or a computer. This makes our spoken conversations the central source for possible collaborative endeavors. Iara and I have discussed projects to theorize a diasporic black feminism, for example, and yet the asymmetries in our lives challenge our efforts. Much like the financial constraints that have historically restricted black women's abilities [End Page 451] to physically travel near or far, minimal resources also have disallowed black women from elements of formal education most valued by capitalist economies and institutions. Her limited practice of writing on keyboards or the page has much to do with her not having an academic education that demanded writing as a skill. In addition, her career necessitated eloquence and precision in speech more than in the written word. With greater mobility than Iara, I have been able to generate the resources needed to live in and visit Brazil, to contact Iara by phone or computer, and to be able to write in some semi-permanent form—academic writing. In the labor of mutuality, however, she has consistently carved time out of her demanding schedule and away from her family to invest in a dialogue and our relationship, which feels fragile and vulnerable to such realities as a disconnected phone or inability to pay the bills.

Giving analytic attention to these intimate realms of black women's ways of being help us to practice and create diaspora. By recognizing our feelings and respective circumstances, we take seriously the differences that challenge these engagements. This practice is essential to our searches and the encounters we long for, from being negatively distorted by the diversity of our persons. Coming to terms with the delicate nature of what sustains our connections and mutual relevance guides us to stay in touch and engage one another. Exchanging ideas and desires grounds the process of finding one another and continuing on our search for contact and fellowship, especially when moving in the presence of fragmenting forces. Black women's writing, in the abbreviated form laid out, makes diaspora of these inspired acts.

Of Poems

In the quiet of her dining room, Iris narrated her life rifling through boxes of paper and photographs, and opening cards and memories. She was part of a singing group of thirty-five older black women, I researched, in a low-income neighborhood located in the periphery of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. A local black activist, Valdete, formed the group in the late 1980s to improve her peers' mental wellness and quality of life. Iris was one of the original members and one of the first women to express interest in participating [End Page 452] in the project. She approached me quietly and invited me to her home. I interviewed Iris during my preliminary research trip in 2004 and then spent numerous days during my fieldwork (2005–2007), as I attempted to understand her inner life and how the group had shaped it.

In a 2006 interview, Iris made a poignant statement about the work of black women writing themselves. We sat at her dining table and when I asked Iris for consent to record, she smiled, said yes, and then offered the following elaboration: "We live not knowing what we have lived. I never studied, never traveled far and always served. If someone wants to say something, it is worth it. . . to have them say we existed in this world. Because otherwise we die and it seems as if we were not here and we were, for better or worse, pretty or ugly, knowledgeable or unable to read. But I lived, I lived sixty-eight years and when I die it all ends" (Iris, interview by author, Belo Horizonte, April 4, 2006). Documenting her literal existence and sharing her story were primary reasons Iris participated. Fear of invisibility and disappearance are intricately wound into the poetry Iris wrote. As a woman who lived in the solitude of her home, she turned to poetry as a conduit for her desires, hurts, and some of the questions that circulated in her mind. Her poetry and story reflect the experiences of black women of her generation. Reminiscent of the autobiographical accounts of Liking's Halla, Kincaid's Xuela, and even of Hartman, Iris's life narrative, in effect, conjures the story of many other black women—stories of those unknown, lost, and not cared about. She refused to have her story disappear or go untold. Iris's acknowledgment of her invisibility and longing to be heard infers an understanding that her story is seen as unimportant because of her social positioning. This sentiment echoes Xuela's concluding words, "Since I do not matter, I do not long to matter, but I matter anyways" (Kincaid 1996, 228). These lines suggest there is something worth telling about her life because for some, her story does matter. From Brazil to the U.S., black women labor to have their voices gain audibility on their own terms (Collins 2000, 112–119). Iris affirms that her life matters because it dialogues with the stories of many other black women.

Iris's writing also evidences the love story I propose diaspora to be. She wrote poetry, both in content and in form, and I save it for last because it expresses the spectrum of emotion Hartman speaks of as encompassed in the story of diaspora—love and betrayal and all that is in between. Like [End Page 453] Hartman's writing, Iris's also evokes the drive to continue searching for communion, even if it is yet to be defined. She tells her complex story through her poetic narratives and literal poems with faith in others to encounter them. Her writings possess the intention and hope to translate her experiences into testimonies of her presence for an unknown keeper who might one day meet parts of themselves in her words. This act of trust exudes Iris's love for humanity in general, but is specifically driven by a search for meaningful engagement. Love carries Iris and her writing into the lives of others.

Iris shared poems and free form autobiographical narratives about her beginnings in the countryside of the state of Minas Gerais and her adulthood in the city. She details conforming to the expectations of women of her generation to be of service and speaks about the agonizing deaths of several children, her bout with tuberculosis, and her range of emotions as a homemaker. Iris ruminates on her hardships and missed opportunities for happiness, candidly presenting the complexity of living as a black woman in her mid-sixties, including asserting her desires. I interlace snippets of these works to illustrate how poetic writing conveys another practice in the love story of diaspora.

The little beauty of mommy, the beauty of Dad and little beauty of João my husband.

Mother of my sons, Aunt of my nephews and nieces, grandmothers of my grandchildren. . . . .

And today I am Mrs. Maria, Mrs. Little Beauty. Mrs. Iris, D. Beauty. I so wanted to be special for someone, really special, to be prepared, studied, traveled, and I am not!

("Iris," 2001).

Without a doubt, Iris takes great pride in the creation of her family and the one from which she comes.⁵ Yet her written desire to be "special" speaks less about a subjective account of feelings of value or personal worth, than a clear expression of a longing to have her story and experiences recognized and heard. Her poetic prose reflects the literality of her daily existence and her emotional isolation in the home. Iris started writing poetry as an adult and explained she would write in the pauses between cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the home and kids, jotting down on whatever pieces of paper were lying around the subjects on her mind. When she showed [End Page 454] me these papers, she sometimes laughed at the content of her poems describing them as what was inside her head. Never speaking of journals or stories, she used the poetic form to translate her internal world into language.

Iris's handwriting is jagged and her prose gentle. While her brothers were formally educated she received minimal formal education and little opportunity to make her cursive flow. This was the case of many women in the singing group who learned to read and write as adults.⁶ Although the group formed around these women's common consumption of anti-anxiety medication, its mission was to discuss and address the isolation and overwhelm they experienced as peers, often in marriages not of their choosing, as single parents, traditionally raised, and the difficulty they faced as economically poor black women living in a favela. Valdete, a community activist gathered these women in the neighborhood to create support and solidarity for women who had lived all too similar trials. Valdete understood the sense of being alone, laid bare, and unreachable, as aspects of the depression her peers were experiencing and formed the group as a therapeutic. Iris joined at the encouragement of her younger sister and the group created another opportunity for her expression along with her writing.

From "Disparity" (n/d) to "The Way I Think" (1997) to "Pretention" (1999), Iris's poems reflect her pondering of what she witnesses as a now-aging black woman from the interior, a homemaker, and living in a low-income urban neighborhood.⁷ In "Identity," she honors her own challenges while also recognizing that she has learned from them:

some of my thoughts a bit of reality and more truth that I arrive at when reminiscing that bring back sufferings of living difficulties many difficulties, difficulties I have so many difficulties I never was one to dream of what could be I am more of waiting, to see what happens day-by-day and look and learn to live, live, live and learn to cry or fight and continue to hope, to find how to get through and see the moments of joy and have real joy everyday

(n.d.).

In this passage, Iris joins the emotions of hope and despair as a cautionary note to a potential reader about life's trials and misplaced focus on pain, which blinded her from experiencing an ever-present feeling of joy. Many [End Page 455] of Iris's yearnings, ranging from the profoundly spiritual and existential to the idealized, speak to what she has learned from her life. As Lorde writes, "The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of daily lives" (1984, 37). Perhaps utopic in tone, Iris's longings originate in relation to the inequality and subordination she had lived. Her use of her troubles to imagine a different world not just for black women, but for all, is consistent with the notion of diaspora as love story.

Like the other women of this essay, Iris writes herself to find others and invite connection and inspiration. These desires, I contend, underlie her poetry and her willingness to impart her story to me in these sunset years of her life. Her writing counters black women's stereotypes and the prospect of not mattering in a society by anticipating that someone will read and relate to it. Often, black women do not openly address their fear of expression because silence feels safer than self-revelation and possible scrutiny (Lorde 1984, 42). Iris (and Iara) write their fears and in doing so, expand the possibilities for identification, connection, and new relationships. As a prescriptive to a vision of a transnational feminism, M. Jacqui Alexander stresses: "We would need to adopt as daily practices, ways of being and of relating, modes of analyzing, and strategies of organizing in which we constantly mobilize identification and solidarity, across all borders, as key elements in the repertoire of risks we need to take to see ourselves as part of one another, even in the context of difference" (2005, 265). Through Iris's practice of writing poetry and then singing with the group, she expressed her own daily searches for community. She described finding pleasurable expression in the singing and dancing. This pleasure signals her creation of alternative modes of (self) manifestation that differ from simply socializing with others. Iris found interlocutors and a common journey with group members who came together because of resonance in their lives. Through their music, their experiences and feelings, they converse with one another, much like Iris's conveys her accomplishments and missteps. These revelations transcribed into words transcend her body and create the possibilities of encountering others and beginning a conversation.

I learned and discovered that I already knew what I thought, that what I did not know and don't know much of what I would like to know or what [End Page 456] I should know and know what I can learn many things still and continue without knowing many others the world is so fantastic and it does not teach everything, leaving the mystery to be discovered and in this search is where and when you find God

(Iris, "Iris," 2001).

A stroke in 2004 interrupted Iris's writing by altering her speech and her ability to express her thoughts through a pen. Iris wrote all the poetry she shared with me before the stroke and lamented the ways it affected her communication. She depended upon the patience of others to stay with the sentences she verbally tried to form without the readily available vocabulary she once possessed. I had interviewed Iris before the stroke, when her language flowed in a different cadence and when she modestly spoke of herself as a poet. After her stroke, poetry became part of what she used to do. And even when I pushed her, challenging the idea that she could no longer write, Iris ambivalently shook her head. In the absence of this mode of expression, Iris spoke more about life's mystery, frequently referring to how everything was in God's hands. Her opening words—"if someone wants to say something, it is worth it. . ." gain greater meaning in the context her body's frailty. Iris's desire to be recognized (not necessarily as a poet) fuelled such activities as her participation in the group and her openness to conversations with researchers like me.

Iris continued to search for and write herself. She bemoaned not having her previous facility with language, either spoken or written; and she supplemented her speech with photographs and objects, and walked me through the daily movements of her younger life in the neighborhood (Henery 2010). Iris wrote herself into dialogue with me as a black woman and as a researcher through this assemblage of experiences and acts. In spite of our many differences (nationality, age, and economic advantage to name a few), these women's lives framed my interest in the group and Iris as one of its participants. Reminiscent of Perry's (2009) understanding of solidarity as one of the guiding motives and functions of black women's diasporic practices, Iris's search for recognition carried with it the identification of messengers to document and preserve her story.

Gumbs (2010) reveals the import of black women's acts of connection and perseverance in their varied writings by theorizing the possibilities [End Page 457] opened up through these encounters that transcend space and time. She compellingly shows how Audre Lorde and June Jordan, as prolific poets, wrote themselves into survival before and after their premature deaths to cancer. Gumbs's search through Lorde and Jordan's personal archives display how her own fears and desires enter into conversation with those of these poets.

It is on this premise, the possibility of a timeless conversation and its inspirations, that I suggest Iris entrusted her poetry and stories to me. The act of writing herself holds the intent to have her life documented in the human story and made available for new conversations like my grandmother's letters and Lorde and Jordan's archive. Evocative of Xuela's autobiographical narrative, which encompasses the collective experiences of her mother and "the children she did not have" (1996, 227), Iris's story extends into the lives of other black women past and present through its candor and vulnerability and what it shares about living and longing in the intersections of various forms of social marginalization. All the black women in this essay write their stories from the complexity of their circumstances. Their willingness to speak and their faith that someone will receive their words illustrate the practices of the love story of diaspora. By writing, we make speakable the compassion and humanity obscured by tragedies and we breathe life into the possibility of our experiences informing others.

TimeIt's time here, it's time thereIt's time in me, it's time in you

It's time to hear from time what time saysIt's time to feel in time that it is time to be happy

It's a time of love, it's a time of peaceTime to continue forwardTime to look back

It's time to know timeThe time that time has [End Page 458] And time to understand that timeDoes not have time to wait for no one

It's time to add up loveTime to diminish warTime to multiply peaceTo divide the bread

It's mathematical time of timeOf time and of its spaceIt's time of much loveTime to get mixed-up in a great, immense hug

(Iris, 1999).

In Closing

So what if diaspora were a love story? Then my grandmother through her letters in stacked boxes called me back south, bypassing Guyana, and landing me in Brazil where my meeting and writing about black women began. There, I encountered Iris and Iara, two women generations and states apart in Brazil, whose voices now merge and commune with those of my grandmother. In the same moment, Iara's quest to organize around black women's health veered into a search for a state of understanding and calm living in a body with cancer. Our conversations continue over the phone, email, and the popular WhatsApp, even as she moved several times in search of work. Iris's trajectory from the interior to the city, from mother to poet to singer to woman of gestures, is now a memory for a future she explores less scripted in language. It is from within these so-called less noticed or unpublished accounts—the ones Hartman longs to tell—that black women write themselves and connect with others.

The diaspora in this essay moves away from histories of migration, physical meetings, and homelands, into words, spoken and written, and desires expressed and yet-to-be fulfilled between black women. Our relations, when envisioned through queer intergenerationality, transform our desires and creative impulses, housed within, into the site [End Page 459] of our collective possibilities. The writing of our stories and the listening of others not only ease the isolation of our social worlds but function as essential practices in inspiring searches and discovery that lead to connections across land, bodies of water, human difference and even time. These experiences and crossings remain vital to our collective future and recognize the many dimensions of love as the organizing force of our story.